Gainsight helps innovative companies protect and nurture their most valuable asset - their customers - with the power of our award-winning platform. With our Customer Success Solution, you can gain deeper insights into customer behavior, operationalize the customer lifecycle, and coordinate actions and results across teams.

This article supports Gainsight NXT, the next evolution of the Customer Success platform. New and upgraded customers are deployed on Gainsight NXT.

If you have not upgraded and are using Gainsight Salesforce Edition, you can find supporting documentation here.

CSMs can send emails directly to contacts from Cockpit using the Email Assist feature. For example, a CSM might want to send an email directly from Cockpit when they needs to reach out to a customer to determine a suitable time to conduct an EBR; or to gather more details about a negative response to an NPS Survey. (More ideas for templates here.)

You can add Email tasks in your Playbooks. During Playbook creation, you can select a Journey Orchestrator email template to associate with an email task. You also have the opportunity to Map any Tokens in the email template. Once the Playbook is applied to a CTA (via a Rule or manually in Cockpit), the Email Task is visible to the CSM under the specific CTA. The email template can be customized and sent to the selected contacts.

Emails are sent using the Gainsight Email Service (Sendgrid or Mandrill, depending on the configuration at Tenant level). You can add the Email Task type in the Company and Relationship Playbooks.

This article has instructions for the users who have access to create Playbooks and therefore Email Tasks (typically Admins, but depends on your org). For instructions for CSMs to send emails from Cockpit, refer to Send Email Tasks from Cockpit (aka, Email Assist).

Note: Users cannot manually add Email Tasks to CTAs in Cockpit. However, they can manually add a Playbook containing an Email Task to their CTAs.

Add an Email Task to a Playbook

Navigate to Administration > Workflow > Playbooks.

Click +PLAYBOOK to create a new Playbook, or click +TASK next to an existing Playbook’s name to add a new task. Create New Playbook Task window appears.

In the Create New Playbook Task window, you can see the usual options and the Type drop-down with two options: Task and Email. Select Email to create an Email Task.

After you select the Email Task Type, an additional drop-down is displayed that allows you to select an Email Template from Journey Orchestrator. For instructions, on how to make email templates, refer to <<Create Journey Orchestrator Email Templates>>.

After selecting the email template, click the MapTokens icon to display the Map Email Tokens window. In this window, you can map any placeholders in the email template (similar to how you map tokens in email templates during Journey Orchestrator Program configuration).

In the Map Email Tokens window, hover by the placeholder text and click the mapping icon; then select the appropriate field for mapping. Click MAP.Note: Tokens can come from these source objects -- Person, Company, CS Task, Call To Action and User. If you are using a Relationship Playbook, you can also pull in Relationship attributes. Tokens will be replaced dynamically when the end user selects a user in the To field, and sends the email. If a token is null, the end user will have the option of deleting it and replacing with plain text.

(Optional) Click the Refresh button highlighted in the below image to import the latest content from Email Templates, and reset the existing token mappings. However, the latest content will not be reflected in the existing CTAs (where a Playbook containing this Email Template is used).Note: If you click the button highlighted in the image below, you must configure the token mappings again.

Back in the Create New Playbook Task window, finish making your selections (Due Date, Priority, etc.), and click SAVE.

The Playbook is available for use with Rules that generate CTAs, as well as users can apply the Playbook manually to CTAs in Cockpit.

Add Survey template in Email Task

To add an Email Template with a Survey link:

Add an Email task by navigating to Administration > Workflow > Playbook > +Playbook > +Task.Note:Email Templates with survey links can only be added to tasks on the Company and Relationship tabs.

Select any Survey template from the Email Template drop-down list. Refer to the following image:Note: The Map Token icon is displayed soon after you select any email template.

Click the Map Tokens icon as shown in the following image. Map Email Tokens dialog appears.

Survey tokens are displayed in the Map Email Tokens dialog.

Click a Survey token to edit the details in the respective dialog box. (Button or Link is displayed depends on the selected survey template).

For Survey Link:

For Survey Button:

Customize survey details in this dialog box as required.

Edit the following:

Display/Button Text: Enter an appropriate label for the Survey button.

Enable Link Tracking: Click to enable link tracking. Link Tracking gives Gainsight the ability to track when users click links you send them and record this within Journey Orchestrator analytics. This feature lengthens the URL of the link, which can negatively impact email deliverability. For this reason, this feature is disabled by default.

Show Rounded Corners: Click to display a button with rounded corners.

Width/Height: Select the width and height of the button in pixels.

Click INSERT to update the details of the Survey button/link or click CANCEL.

Click MAP to map the tokens or click CANCEL.

Notes:

For surveys with associated objects, the link is not established and the associated object mapping is not allowed from playbook.

Import a report from the available options in the Report placeholder. The respective report is displayed.Note: Tabular reports are not supported.

You can also map Filters. Click the Filter icon to add filters:

Company and Person lookups for Company playbooks

Relationship and Person lookups for Relationship playbooks.

Limitation: You cannot filter reports by relationship attribute. The present configuration allows only Company and Person level filters.Note: Gear and Visualization icons function the same as in Journey Orchestrator Email templates. For more information, refer to <<Review Journey Orchestrator Analytics (Reports)>>TBD.

Click MAP to map the tokens or click CANCEL.

Notes:

For both company and relationship email tasks, only the reports with objects that have company lookup field can be added.

Whenever you preview a report, the current data is displayed.

BCC the Admin

Administrators can add their email address (or any email address) to the BCC of all emails sent from Cockpit. To set this up, navigate to Administration > Email Configuration > Compliance. Enter the email address and click Save.

Reporting on Email Tasks

Email Tasks are not included in out-of-the-box Journey Orchestrator Analytics. However, you can build a report on the Email Logs object and display it on the Gainsight Home page or in a C360 section, if you would like users to be able to view open/click/view stats on their emails. The email engagement data is only available on the Email Logs object.

For Cockpit Email Assist open rates, use Email Logs Object and filter use case = Cockpit. In Email Logs, we have a field called Batch ID which has the ID of the CS Task when the email is sent from Cockpit. The "Email Opens" data that's visible in the task detail view comes from the Batch ID. Open count is the number of times the email has been opened and this includes stats for the recipient in the "To" field.

To track Email Assist usage by team member, use CS Task Object, Filter type name = email and use the IsEmailSent field on CS Task object.

Limitation to Tracking Email Opens

Even with Link Tracking enabled, Tracking whether the email was opened by the recipient may not work if it has been purposefully blocked by the customer's email client security settings.

For Email Assist tasks, Gainsight tracks open statistics by using a small invisible image attached to each email. When that image is loaded, it sends information back to the Gainsight logs to say that the email was opened. This tracking method is fairly standard among email providers.

With the Email Assist feature, it is observed that sometimes the tracking image is blocked when the email is received. Unless the user clicks "Show all images" in the email, we cannot track whether or not the email was opened. This is a common limitation that all email service providers encounter.

In Journey Orchestrator emails, the tracking link itself is embedded in the URL, so this is not an issue.

On a related note, if the contact in 'To' forwards an email to 10 other contacts, then those 10 emails will be tracked against her name. The open rate count will be added against the 'To' ID when the forwarded email is opened.

Template Ideas

Here are some additional ideas for email templates you could setup in Journey Orchestrator for use with Cockpit Email Tasks:

NPS Followups (promoter, passive, detractor)

Customer Anniversary CTAs

Reference Request Emails

Usage Drops

Support Risks

CSM Transitions

New Feature Explanations

Customer Escalations

Scheduling Meetings

Helpful/Recommended Resources

Training/Webinar Invitation

Playbook with Most Common Email Templates

Although end users can't manually create an Email Task from Cockpit, you can create a Playbook containing your top 5 email templates as tasks, and allow end users to apply the Playbook to a CTA in Cockpit. In this scenario, most likely your end user created a CTA manually, and the primary task is to send an email, so they just need a Playbook containing the most common email templates. Then, they can delete any of the unnecessary email templates/tasks from the CTA.

Other Use Cases and Recommendations

If you have a team of people managing the same company, then the CTA owner could be different from the Email task owner. In this case, we recommend using CS Task > Owner Name in the email signature section, instead of CSM Name. This way, the name of whoever is sending the email displays in the signature.

If you’re using Email tasks to send internal emails, then in the body of the email, Gainsight recommends using the token User > First Name, instead of Person > First Name.

Tips

Be sure to map tokens in your email templates, because end users don't have the ability to do so in the Email Task

If you make changes to an Email Template that's linked to an Email Assist task, be sure to go back to the Playbook, and refresh the template and map the tokens again (existing CTAs with the Playbook will not automatically update, but end users can delete the playbook and re-apply it to get the updated version)